Fouling in commercial fluidized bed reactors, including gas phase polymerization reactors, is a significant operational issue. Fouling negatively impact operational efficiency and ultimately requires time-consuming shutdown and maintenance.
Understanding the causal factors of fouling within the reactor systems would be beneficial in reducing fouling. Fouling in fluidized bed reactors can be strongly affected by physical processes within the fluidized bed reactor, such as electrostatic charge and solids carryover within a recycle loop.
Commercial probes, including those commonly referred to as static probes and acoustic probes, exist for measuring certain physical parameters within fluidized bed reactors, such as electrostatic charge and solids flow. In common practice, however, these probes do not reliably directly measure these phenomena, and are instead dominated by noise and/or artifacts in the signals. Thus, probe signals have proven to be of limited or no value in monitoring the operational status of or diagnosing inefficiencies in fluidized bed reactors.
It would be desirable to have new methods for processing and interpreting probe signals in fluidized bed reactor systems. It would further be desirable to have new methods that provide for more efficient system operation and reliability.